Published 4:00 am, Friday, August 21, 2009

Young Woman and the Sea

How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World

By Glenn Stout

In the world of sports literature, swimming books are few and far between. There are autobiographies of Olympians and workout manuals by top coaches, but not many books satisfy the appetite of swimming aficionados who seek a good read about the sport's evolution.

Glenn Stout's "Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World" is a welcome exception.

The book not only examines the history of swimming and the challenges of making it across the channel but also offers insights into the women's movement. It begins with an account of a fire aboard the General Slocum steamship in 1904 in New York City. The disaster, in which more than 1,000 people - many of them women and children - drowned, triggered a movement to teach women to swim, and gave birth to the Women's Swimming Association.

But the star of Stout's account is Gertrude "Trudy" Ederle, who in 1926 became the first woman to swim the English Channel - to this day considered the Mount Everest of the sport. Cold waters and rough currents make the 21 miles between Dover, England, and Cape Gris-Nez, France, notoriously challenging.

Stout argues that Ederle - only the sixth person to cross the channel at the time - was a pioneer in her sport and also a trailblazer in the growing women's movement of the Roaring Twenties.

Long after she made history, Ederle remains an inspiration and heroine in the swimming community. As an open-water swimmer, I came to know about her while preparing for the Manhattan Island Foundation's races in New York's Hudson and East rivers. In fact, the foundation's 17.5-mile swim in the Hudson is named after her.

Stout is at his best when exploring Ederle's personal history. She was born into a family of seven children, the daughter of German immigrants who settled in New York. Despite her athletic skills, she was a shy girl, often retreating to books. She also had a hearing problem that some say was exacerbated by swimming.

After her channel swim, Ederle rarely granted interviews. A back injury eventually forced her to retire from the sport. Despite hundreds of marriage proposals, she never married; instead, she devoted her life to teaching deaf children how to swim. She died at age 98 in 2003.

Taken as a whole, Stout's biography is an inspiring story of a woman who had the unique ability to endure the cold and unpredictability of open water. In return, the water gave her the gift of self-confidence. Ederle found peace and freedom in the water, felt most at home in it.

"To me," she once said, "the sea is like a person - like a child that I've known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea, I talk to it. I never feel alone when I'm out there."